December 5, 2015

A new blogger friend mentioned Flora Bowley’s book, ‘Brave intuitive painting’, and I was immediately curious. I looked at her video and knew this way of working would take me forward. In the last months, I kept hitting that edge of letting go, but somehow my training and conditioning wouldn’t let me do that on a canvas!! There was a strict division between the art I did personally, privately- collages to process some issues, or create visions and goals, and various watercolor fantasies. But set that canvas up on the easel, lay out the paints and brushes, and The Professional Artist persona quickly came in to direct the show. ‘We’ll do it like this’, she said. Well, I soon took care of her!

So then I could get on with it. The piece at the top of this page was inspired by an ornament my Tai Chi teacher and friend Lian gave me (you can just make out the little gold shape to the left of the painting up top). My previous attempts at working loosely were nice but quite chaotic and fragmented. This time, I wanted to work with a single simple shape, the plant reminds me of oleander, which has strong healing properties. I drew the plant on canvas board loosely with walnut ink (very water soluble after it dries) and worked into it with watercolour sticks and brush. I redrew the outlines with acrylic very quickly. Next step was to block in the colour, which I had an idea about before I started.

And finally I firmed up the colours. I wanted good rich earth colours at the bottom merging into lighter shades and finally some ethereal pastels lighting up the top where the flowers are. It is 30 x 50cm. Interesting proportion to work with. That’s pretty much how I’m going to leave it.